lovely-legs-willow wrote:
I currently have an external hard drive that I linked to Time Machine to auto backup. I have used this same hard drive to back up my photos and files in folders. It’s format is showing as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
I can’t use this hard drive in any windows based PC it simply doesn’t show up. I thought I’d just move the photos and files to a new hard drive but it won’t let me as the new hard drive is NTFS format.
Yes I could reformat the new hard drive to the same format (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) but I will run into the same error of not being able to see / use it on a windows pc.
Any ideas how to get my photos and files of this Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatted hard drive onto another and more user friendly option?
Out of the box, macOS can read files from (but not write files to) NTFS filesystems – whereas Windows is unable to cope with Mac filesystems at all. This, despite the fact that Apple included a HFS+ implementation as a part of their Darwin (Open Source) distribution, while I am unaware of Microsoft distributing Open Source NTFS implementations at all.
As far as the filesystem goes, you can use a Mac to copy files onto
- A FAT32- or exFAT-formatted drive
- A NTFS drive (if you have something like Paragon NTFS for the Mac)
You could also get MacDrive for the Windows PC.
Note that the fact that you want to copy files from a Time Machine backup adds an extra wrinkle. Time Machine has its own way of layering versioned backups on top of HFS+ or APFS, with the idea that users should not mess around inside the filesystem directly, but should use the Time Machine application to retrieve files from those backups.
Even if you had MacDrive for the Windows PC, you would want to use a Mac to copy a snapshot of your files out of the Time Machine backup, as Windows would not have anything like Time Machine to make that job easy.
